Relief agencies and other organizations are a source of comfort and assistance to individuals and families in times of need. One type of assistance commonly provided by relief agencies is financial assistance. For instance, certain relief agencies provide recipients with vouchers for use as payment for food, clothing, and other necessities at one or more retail stores, markets, or special relief outlets. Conventional vouchers are not provided in any particular physical format. Some vouchers may be printed on a small paperboard card while others are printed on a letter-size piece of paper. Vouchers generally are printed with a monetary value for which the voucher can be redeemed and are associated with a list of approved products that can be purchased with the voucher and/or restricted products that cannot be purchased with the voucher.
During use, recipients typically present vouchers to a cashier at the point-of-sale (POS) terminal of a retail or other redemption site either before, during, or after a plurality of items have been processed for sale. The cashier first attempts to verify the validity of the voucher, which is often complicated by the lack of physical uniformity in the vouchers. Once the voucher is verified, the cashier examines each item being purchased and determines if a particular voucher can be applied toward the purchase of that item (i.e., the employee must determine if the items are approved or restricted items). This task is complicated in mixed transactions in which the voucher can be applied toward some but not all of the products being purchased in a single transaction.
Cashiers also police use of the voucher only for purchases up to the amount specified on the voucher. For instance, if the voucher is for $100 in food supplies, the cashier polices the transaction to be sure the voucher is not applied to cover all of a $102 food supply purchase. In view of the above, the cashier is required to enforce any voucher terms of use defined by the issuing relief agency. However, by requiring cashiers to enforce voucher terms of use in addition to their typical duties and in view of the number of variables to be policed, the opportunities for errors in processing the vouchers, and the recipient time spent at the POS terminal during check-out, increase.
In addition, relief agencies typically require an accounting of what items were purchased with the vouchers. In one conventional voucher system, such accountability requires a cashier to obtain a bar code or other identifier corresponding to the relief agency that provided the voucher. The identifier is entered into the POS terminal along with a serial number of the particular voucher being used to pay for at least a portion of the purchase. This act once again relies on the cashier to find and select the appropriate relief agency identifier and to properly enter all related information into the POS terminal. Not only does this provide additional opportunities for error, but it also delays the check-out process, which may frustrate the recipient as well as other consumers waiting to process their purchases at the POS terminal.